“Why?” he asked. “Why Slavic?”
“Because her mother only speaks English and Irish, and as a teenager she didn’t want her mouth washed out with soap for language. Her father thinks it’s hilarious, so she tells me.” Her expression eased a little, when she found nothing wrong. “Sovie did a great job. Not that I didn’t expect it, I mean, she is a medical doctor and I’m not, but it makes me feel better to be sure. Go ahead and sit up for now.”
When he had made room, she joined him on the couch, with just enough distance between them to make it…non-personal. Like two people in a waiting room. Good thing she had an oversized couch; even when he was sitting up, Gairdner took up a lot of real estate. She reached for a mint from the bowl on the coffee-table and shoved the bowl towards him. “I think it’s time to bring in Silent Knight and Shakti. Ramona’s felt them both out, and they’re definitely disaffected. Vickie’s new Overwatch rig means we won’t be running the same risks wiring people that we were before.”
His brows creased ever so slightly. “Will the rig work within Knight’s armor and without being disrupted by his sonic power? He can’t keep running to her to replace it. And I’m not certain Shakti is…stable. Losing Handsome Devil like that…”
“Vix assures me the answer is yes to Knight, and, that’s why I am asking you about Shakti. She’s definitely skittish about seeing me or anyone else for head-work. I can barely get her to come in to see Mary Ann when she gets injured. You know her better than I do.” It was such a relief to be able to bounce things off of Bulwark. She didn’t feel as if she had to keep second-guessing herself all the time anymore. “But wouldn’t giving her something else to think about and work towards actually do her good? I mean, yes, we have our covert goal, but in the long run, this is all about making ECHO as solid as it ever was in the best days, and it’s all about making sure our people are given what they need.”
He thought about that. “Perhaps,” he said finally. “Work has certainly proved beneficial for me.”
Hooboy. There it was, the opportunity to talk about the Elephant In The Room. She grabbed it. “After Harmony?” she asked, and quickly snatched the imp of jealousy that scratched and clawed its way out of her id and stuffed it back inside the mental box she’d been keeping it in. “Bull…I haven’t had a chance to say this, but I am…I’m horribly sorry for your loss. I’d murder her in a New York minute if I ever see her again, but I am sorry for…hell, I can’t even begin to think what it feels like to be in a relationship with someone and have her turn on you like that. And if there’s anything I can do to help—”
Like rip off your shirt and drag you off for a good therapeutic…DOWN, GIRL! Business face, business manners. Just get the Elephant out of the way and move on. On. Not in. He wasn’t a slab of beefcake, after all. This just like all the other times he’d been here; this was to take advantage of his deep knowledge of ECHO, his much broader experience, and his superb sense for tactics and planning. One of the smartest things she had ever heard a military man say was that a really good leader didn’t try to know or be everything; a really good leader made sure he had people around him that he could trust, people who knew their stuff and were going to be blunt and honest. And he kept those people around to advise him, and never got angry when they said something he didn’t like.
That was Bull. Smart. He thought in terms of the long and short goals. Patient, more patient than she was. Experienced in ways she never would be. Indomitable. Never ran out on an impulse. Okay, sometimes you had to do that, when your back was to the wall and you had no plans and no choice, and that was her strength, to leap into the wind when the chips were all down and trust that something would turn up, that at the last minute she’d spot something that would pull everything out of the fire. But most of the time you needed plans, you needed strategies, and when you were running a rebellion, you needed a military turn of mind. Which she most assuredly did not have.
He was staring at her as if she was speaking Urdu. “What?” he said.
She found her cheeks turning hot. “Uh…you. Harmony. Relationship. When you were…out…I got a flash of when she kissed you, what she said. I didn’t mean to, but the telempathy is something I don’t have a lot of control over. I’m…really sorry your…uh…girl…turned out to be so toxic.” God, did that come out as clumsy as it sounds to me? Probably. Great, now I sound like an idiot.
“There was nothing of that nature between myself and Harmony,” he said, looking slightly perplexed. “At least, not from my end. She may have been ‘playing for the cameras,’ or who knows? Perhaps in the dim recesses of her demented mind she truly has such feelings for me. Not that it matters. I grossly misjudged her.”
Great, now I FEEL like an idiot, she thought, her cheeks getting hotter. And…great, so the “I’ve benefitted from work” thing is about Amethist, not Harmony. My competition is the dead wife. Yeah, that’ll be easier. “Well…that’s…good I guess. If I ever see her again I can clean her clock without worrying about making you feel bad.”
Bull looked into her eyes, and favored her with a rare smile. “No, I think I would enjoy seeing that.”
The flush of embarrassment changed to a blush of mingled confusion and pleasure. But she played it for comedy. “And here I thought you only got off on watching me put the Djinni on his keister.”
He nodded. “That’s good too, but you know as well as I do that of all of us, he gets the most pleasure out of it.”
“Perv. Him, not you.” But she said it without rancor. “Uhm…speaking of the perv, I’ve been studying how he heals, and that gave me an idea, so I looked up a couple of other metas and studied their innards. In between, you know, running ECHO Med and a rebellion.” She gave him a wry grin. “I know you’re going to keep right on trying to hold up the world, and I figured I’d see if I could improve your odds of doing so. So…uhm…I was wondering if you’d let me try tinkering with you a little. It won’t be anything drastic, but I know, provided you have the healing factor in you, that I can make you heal faster. And I think I can fix things so you don’t stand the risk of losing your spleen every time you try and hold up a building. As long as it’s only two stories. I make no promises for three or more.”
Bulwark considered that. “Near death experiences from being crushed by countless tonnes of falling concrete, steel and glass. Yes, that is indeed getting old. What are you suggesting?”
“Red’s skin heals almost instantaneously, but the rest of him can as well, when properly amped up. I can’t deliver that, but I think I can teach your cells to speed up a bit, from what I’ve learned from him. It seems to be a pretty common metahuman ability, just not everyone gets it triggered. I think I can trigger it in you, provided you have it. For the rest…” she pursed her lips. “Navy Seal—he’s over in the retirement community with Dixie—his organs are conditioned to take compression and decompression like a marine mammal’s, and here’s the weird thing, my research says there’s records showing regular non-metas can do that too, so I bet I can do the same for you. The last thing is Untermensch. He’s got some extra reinforcement, like the ‘silverskin’ you find around beef primals on all his muscle groups, around each of his more fragile organs. I know I can get that to grow. It’s just a matter of convincing a few cells to differentiate. So, that’s the untested part. You game to try?” She sighed wistfully. “I’d love to do this for everyone, but…I mean, this is a gamble. An experiment. I’m totally confident it will work, but I can’t try it on me, that’s the thing, I’d do it on myself first but it’s not possible. You’re the best and most needful candidate, but it’s never been done before and not everybody wants to be Number One.”
Bull thought it over, and finally nodded. “It seems we have an opportunity here. If you truly think you can speed up my natural healing, reinforce my body against harm and do so safely, I think we owe it the others to try.”
“Lie back down then, I need to do the whole ‘laying on of hands’ gig.” He obeyed her, and
she placed her palms flat on his torso, shoving her concentration strictly into business mode. She moved her focus down to the level of the very, very small, looking for that elusive whatever-it-was that meant a meta could heal faster than normal. “Sovie thinks the healing factors are in the mitochondria,” she said, conversationally, her eyes half-closed as she “looked” with that inner eye. “She doesn’t know why it gets triggered in some metas that have it and not others. And she doesn’t know why some metas have it and some don’t. I’ve got a theory, though. The first of the metas—they could ever only do one or two things at most. And they always triggered in pairs, almost like gladiators. The way La Faucon Blanche got triggered by Valkyria—the powers weren’t duplicates of each other, but they were matches in strength. Around the 60s, though, metas started triggering in isolation, in a vaster spread of relative strengths, and there were metas with several powers. Things have just gotten even more chaotic since then. The only one consistent thing is that for those few metas that had children, the children are always meta. So…it’s like whatever was at work started going into a cosmic blender, and you never knew what was going to come out. And…” She felt a grin coming on, as she identified what she was looking for. “Bingo. You are one of the lucky ones of the lottery. You have the healing factor. And there was much rejoicing.”
“I’ll admit I find that surprising,” Bull said. “I always thought any secondary abilities would be based in raw power, like my shield. Now, you’re sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Healing factor, absolutely. I’ve triggered this before, I did Corbie and Knight. It’s kind of neat, it’s definitely a catalysis reaction, it spreads like a firework exploding. And here…we…go.”
She “talked” to the cells under her palms, and felt them respond, wake up, and then—it was like a whoosh, as the trigger spread outwards, like one of those elaborate domino setups, as each cell triggered the ones next to it, and so on. Corbie had said it felt like tossing down a shot of high-powered Scotch. Knight had said it was like the buildup before he emitted a sonic pulse. She wondered what it felt like to Bull.
“You should be feeling something,” she told him. “It shouldn’t be unpleasant…” She closed her eyes for a moment, tracking on the wave as it moved through his body. “To go by Corbie, on your own you’ll recover from—say—a gunshot wound in days instead of weeks. If one of us Healer types is boosting you, it’ll be hours instead of days. And if it’s me and I’m hooked up to the pheresis rig, it’ll be under an hour.”
“Excellent,” Bull said. “Though you will forgive me if I am in no hurry to test this out.”
She took a deep breath and sat back on her heels, opening her eyes completely and flexing her fingers. “Now comes the tricky part. We see if I can make you as tough on the inside as you are on the outside.” She leaned forward again, and put her hands back on his abs. Such gorgeous abs…
Focus!
Find the spleen…that was the one that threatened to rupture first every time he deflected enormous weight with his power. There you are…Now go and explain to the thin membrane around it that she wanted some of the cells to look, not like this, but like that…Yes, and start to multiply, please. And form a nice, tough sheath…flexible, but hard to rupture…
It was fine with the spleen, fine with the kidneys, fine with the lungs and the heart—everything was moving along just as she had pictured, and then she moved on to the stomach and that was when suddenly, everything went pear-shaped. One moment, everything was proceeding exactly as she expected it to. Nice, steady, predictable growth.
The next, there was a runaway process that was exploding in all directions, the way the triggering of the healing factor had. And it wasn’t doing anything she had expected.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, in the part that wasn’t screaming with hysteria, she realized she must have triggered something else, something new, some factor she had never seen before. And it triggered explosively, an entirely different sort of cell rocketing out from her first point of contact, enveloping and changing the ‘silverskin,’ making it tougher, which would have been fine, but making it thicker, picking up some sort of fibrous texture that seemed to have metal or something in it, and threatening to choke off the organs from their own blood supply! Frantically she sent her mind and her talent racing after it, diverting it just in the nick of time, over and over again, but it kept getting away from her and racing off in a different direction.
Omigodomigodomigod I just killed him!
When it hit the heart she completely panicked and sent a raw jolt of energy at it, throwing it into the rib-cage—
It liked the ribs…it dove after the calcified tissue like a hummingbird on nectar, and she panicked all over again until in the next instant she realized that all of the cellular “cats” she’d been chasing seemed to have picked up on that, and were also leaping for the nearest bone.
And it wasn’t hurting him. In fact…in fact, as the stuff made its replicating race over his skeletal mass, it was strengthening that, toughening it, actually penetrating into the surface, making his bones as strong as Untermensch’s were, with a sort of nanotube reinforcing structure of something that definitely was metal, maybe silica. Had she inadvertently triggered that in him? Untermensch’s power?
Where’s he getting the extra mass—
She dared to open her eyes, just as the coffee-table fell over, half of its steel-and-glass expanse eaten away. Of course. He’d been resting one hand on it…
Ohmigod, this is…this has to be the factor that La Faucon Blanc had, the one that made her meld with her plane. The World War II French meta had long since vanished with the others of the Ghost Squadron, in that last fight over the Bermuda Triangle. The same fight that Eisenfaust had vanished in…only to turn up in Atlanta just before the Invasion, trying to warn them.
And then…it was over. At least, she thought it was. She came in closer and laid her head on his chest. She had to be sure. Yes, she felt the last remnants of the multiplying silverskin begin to revert into a quiescent state. It was remarkable, as if the ravenous tissue had instantly been sated. She probed deeper, and realized with some alarm that Bull’s bones were almost completely interlaced with metal, and were now as much metal as calcium. They were lined and meshed with something else, an organic alloy of iron and carbon…steel? If so, it was severely modified steel. With a kind of cellular sigh, everything settled happily into place and began humming healthily along. Terrified of what she would find anyway—afraid to see that his organs were half siliconized—she began a layer by layer check.
He was fine. He was more than fine.
It was the calcified bone, she decided. It had somehow served as both a catalyst and fuel for the silverskin, and when depleted the silverskin had simply reverted to a basal state bent on simple maintenance. The osseous tissue was partly replaced by the organic metal stuff, whatever it was, while still somehow being able to store calcium and keep the bone marrow. It was a very little like the titanium matrices injected as a foam that were being used as bone grafts. He certainly wasn’t going to have to worry about buildings falling on him now. At least, not unless they were bigger than four stories. Maybe not even then. And God help anyone who threw a punch at him; the fool would end up with broken fist and arm.
Note to self; no right crosses to his chin. Oh my god, that was lucky, so very lucky…
She opened her eyes and burst into exhausted tears, throwing herself at his neck impulsively. “Gairdner! Gairdner, oh god, I almost killed you! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—I was stupid, I should never have tried that—” she couldn’t say anything more; she just choked on sobs.
She pulled back and watched as waves of intense pain began to subside from his features. He drew in a long breath and finally his head fell back on the cushions. She hadn’t even realized the agony she had just put him through, having been so focused on fighting back the sudden attack. He never made a sound, there was nothing to reveal the hell he ha
d just gone through. Now, he just lay back, his chest rising and falling in a rhythmic pattern of relief.
“Did it work?” he said, finally. His eyes were still closed, his body limp and vulnerable.
“It did…but I kicked off something else. I had no frikking clue I could trigger anything besides the healing factor. I didn’t when I set off the healing factor in Corbie and Knight.” She choked on another sob. “I am never doing that again. It’s too dangerous.”
“Well, at least we know now,” he grunted, pulling himself up and sitting gingerly with his head in his hands. The couch creaked ominously.
“You…ate half my coffee table,” she said, tentatively, still trying to stop the tears of remorse and guilt.
He nodded. “So, guess I don’t have to worry about eating more fiber today.”
He startled her into a nervous laugh. “It’s—whatever I triggered off started a runaway reaction in the silverskin I was creating, then jumped to your bones. So…you kind of have steel and silica bones now. And very tough guts. No thanks to me.” She started crying again. “Gairdner, I almost killed you!”
He patted her gently. “It was a risk, no matter how sure you were it was safe, these things often are. We got lucky, it seems, but I can live with that.” He tested himself, flexing his arms and lifting his legs with tentative gestures. The couch creaked some more. “Feels a little strange, a little stiff. I suppose I have a lot to get used to now.”
I’m going to have to keep a close watch on him, Bella thought. Make sure there aren’t any bad side-effects out of this. At least his smile was normal. She’d stopped it before it got to his teeth. She looked down, and realized her hands were still pressed to his chest. She covered for it and ran them up to his head and back down his arms, probing what she had done to him in a calmer state of mind. It seemed complete. All the old bone had been completely altered, and the tendons and ligaments strengthened so he wouldn’t tear himself apart trying to move. She wondered how it would heal when broken—how it was going to keep growing back and replenishing. And what about the marrow? Closer watch. Daily checkups at least. Oh god, what HAVE I done?
Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle - eARC Page 34
